Read Online Doll Face by Tim Curran - Free Book Online Page B

goddamn town.
    She knew that in the greater scheme of things, or at least the greater scheme of the town specifically, that it meant something if she could only figure out what. Her head was just too full of shit to figure it out. Too much anxiety and stress and terror and apprehension.
    It was all masking her ability to think clearly, to reason.
    This place was a box, a big black box, but there was a key that opened it if only she could find it and recognize it for what it was.
    The alarm had sounded again and that was trouble.
    The last time it had sounded, the broken man had come to life and that other thing in the van had attacked Chazz, poor, worthless Chazz. In her way of thinking, that meant if there were other mannequin people around, the alarm probably had activated them.
    She had no real proof of that, but she believed it.
    For now, she had to find the others.
    They had to be here somewhere. But that seemed to be part of the problem. Every street seemed to look alike. The business sections were like repetitions of one another as were the residential districts. She swore she saw the same storefronts, the same houses again and again. That was impossible, of course, because she was moving in a straight line, yet the feeling persisted.
    It not only persisted, but it haunted her.
    She stopped there beneath one of the awnings, one of the same striped awnings, trying to make sense of things. Yes, reality was distorted here, but just because it was, that did not necessarily mean there wasn’t a rhyme and a reason behind it all.
    Oh, quit trying to fucking rationalize everything. Don’t you get tired of it all?
    But she didn’t because that’s who and what she was. She had spent her life looking for signs and portents, the systematics and mechanisms behind perfectly ordinary events. Take Chazz, for example. She had known for some time he had been screwing around on her, but she didn’t leave him. She didn’t even broach the subject or sink to his level like many other women might have and start sleeping around. No, not her. She looked for vague clues and hints in conversations and daily activities with him that should have tipped her off that his infidelity was inevitable and wondering what she had done wrong, what she had failed to recognize, and how she must be on guard against minor infractions in their relationship that led to major problems.
    And she was doing that now.
    She waited there, smoking a cigarette, knowing she had to quit before swim season started…but tonight was just not the night.
    She was thinking about that alarm or siren or whatever it had been. She knew the general direction it came from—the east—and she was very tempted to track it to its source because she felt deep inside that if she could do that, she might be able to shut it down, and if she shut it down, she might just shut this whole town down with it.
    But that was foolish and dangerous.
    The reasonable thing was to give up looking and backtrack to where the van had been. That was the point of entry into this madhouse and probably the escape route.
    She turned around, moving faster now in the direction she had come.
    The same storefronts, the same houses, the same everything.
    She walked and walked and walked and it seemed she was still no closer to where she had been, wherever that was and wherever it could be in the greater scheme of this lunacy.
    Bullshit, this is all bullshit, all a cheap fucking game and this town is nothing but a cheap fucking carnival. That’s all it is. That’s all it can be.
    She walked faster, refusing to give in and refusing to accept the grim inevitability that she was going nowhere, that she might as well have been running on a treadmill. Same storefronts, same houses, same trees, same boulevards…God, it went on and on.
    But so did Ramona.
    Because anyone that had ever known her discovered one thing sooner or later: she had a stubborn streak a mile wide and she refused, simply refused, to give up or